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A TV Pioneer, in Rabbit Form

It’s easy to forget that “giants” and “pioneers” are two different things. Take, for instance, the defining technology of the boomer generation, the television. We hear plenty about the giants of the medium, both those who helped create its technology and business model, like David Sarnoff, and those whose faces became famous because of it, like Edward R. Murrow.

These two men, of course, were pioneers as well as giants, but that put them in a small club. Most television pioneers played relatively minor roles, experimenting with how to use or improve the new medium, nudging it along.

Which brings us to Lucille Bliss, who died Nov. 8 at 96. She was part of the first cartoon series made for television, “Crusader Rabbit,” providing the voice of the title character for the initial episodes. It wasn’t much of a part, but if you watch some of the episodes, you can hear that Ms. Bliss put some effort into making the character real. She had to if the show was going to work, since the animation was quite primitive.

Crusader Rabbit Crusade 1 Episode 01Video by candolex

The show began in 1949, a time when the television industry hadn’t even coalesced. Everything was still being made up in seat-of-the-pants fashion. Who would make the television shows? How would they be distributed? How would they generate revenue? What technology would be needed to do it?

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Lucille Bliss, the voice actress who played Crusader Rabbit on TV's first animated series, died at 96 in November.

“Crusader Rabbit,” about a Don Quixote-like bunny with a tiger for a pal, didn’t even have network blessing; it was syndicated.

Ms. Bliss did the rabbit’s voice only in the first incarnation of the show, which ran for a few years, then was revived later in the 1950s. She might not even have been remembered at all if not for some later voice acting, most notably her rendition of Smurfette in the “Smurfs” franchise of the 1980s.

But in a sense, the “Crusader Rabbit” work may have been her most influential because it came at a time when no one quite knew what was going to appeal to viewers and what wasn’t. Would children accustomed to watching fairly sophisticated cartoons in movie theaters be interested in relatively primitive ones on a small screen? Would they be hooked by a serial, which “Crusader Rabbit” was?

They would, if the characters had at least a modest amount of spunk in them. Plenty of shows from very early television, especially shows for children, look lifeless and lazy today, featuring grown-ups who seemed to think that the novelty of seeing a face on a box in the living room would be enough to entertain a child. “Crusader Rabbit” tried a little harder, and in doing so it provided a glimmer of what was to come. Pioneering work, in other words, with Ms. Bliss a small but pivotal part of it.